And the Acosta dustup was from him asking Trump about the “caravan.” Trump ignored him. He’s moved on to the next lie.

]]>Remain skeptical of everything in the newsPeter GowenThu, 08 Nov 2018 18:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/11/8/remain-skeptical-of-everything-in-the-news5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5be47b7b21c67caf3a9822b9…And doubly so if it’s from the White House. Nearly everything Trump or his spokespeople say is a lie or designed to mislead.

Because this doctored video of Jim Acosta blocking the White House press aid from taking the microphone has been making the rounds, and taking up way too much time we could spend talking about bigger issues…

1) Took @PressSec Sarah Sanders' video of briefing2) Tinted red and made transparent over CSPAN video3) Red motion is when they doctored video speed4) Sped up to make Jim Acosta's motion look like a chop5) I've edited video for 15+ years6) The White House doctored it pic.twitter.com/q6arkYSx0V

.@PolitiFact has a roundup of fact checks from the 16 state races it's tracking https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2018/nov/05/2018-midterms-16-senate-races-weve-been-tracking/

.@kevinroose published a helpful guide to the types of misinformation voters might see today. Spoiler: Be wary of any claims about polling places https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/us/politics/misinformation-election-day.html

.@JaneLytv + @CraigSilverman are debunking hoaxes about the election in real time https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/midterms-fake-news-hoaxes

.@rizzoTK has a last-minute crash course for the midterms, complete with 47 fact checks https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/05/fact-checkers-crash-course-elections/

The image President Donald Trump has presented of what US troops will be doing along the southern border bears almost no resemblance to what military leaders say the troops will be doing.

Trump has promised the US military would be blocking “very bad thugs and gang members” from crossing into the country, and he’s painted a picture of armed US troops repelling “very tough fighters” from entering the country. “We hope nothing happens,” he said Thursday during a White House address. “But if it does, we are totally prepared.”

That bellicose language, however, is a clear exaggeration of what Pentagon planners anticipate the up to 7,000 active-duty troops will actually be doing.

The deployment includes no ground combat units. The troops are not allowed to detain or arrest anybody at the border. They are barred from enforcing immigration or criminal law. There is no indication that troops will be manning border checkpoints. Of the 39 units dispatched, only seven are military police units. The rest are trained to do engineering work and provide logistical support or medical assistance.

…

“You’re talking about taking people who have been deployed over and over again, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa…and asking them to spend the holidays away from their families unnecessarily,” he said. “It’s miserable on a human standpoint, knowing your orders are silly to begin with.”

…

“Trump is not being honest with the American people about what these troops are going to be doing. When he talks about them, he creates this word picture for people that these troops are going to be hurling back invaders at the border, side by side with the border patrol,” retired Rear Adm. John Kirby, a former Defense Department spokesperson, said on CNN. “That’s just not the case. In fact, many of them will never even get close to the border.”

A look at what units are being deployed to the border provides more evidence that Trump’s bellicose rhetoric is a stretch…

]]>Every vote countsPeter GowenTue, 06 Nov 2018 15:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/11/6/every-vote-counts5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5be060b6f950b7feaf5a10e1This is one of the most important elections we’ve had in a long time. Please vote. Now more than ever, it matters. Most immediately, we need to thoroughly reject the radicalism that’s taken over the Republican Party: the cronyism, the authoritarianism, and the violent white nationalism. Vote for anyone who rejects Trump-style fascism.

But perhaps more important for the longterm, this may be the last best chance we have to begin pushing back against the corruption at the top simply by voting (and make not mistake this is only a beginning). Power has been allowed to concentrate for decades; at this point, there’s a two-tiered economy as well as justice system, and the voting system is under attack as well (thanks in no small part to the Supreme Court’s undermining of the Voting Rights Act). Vote for every candidate you can who’s going to fight to break up concentrated wealth and capital, and restore and ensure a (small-d) democratic vote.

Vote like a bunch of school children were shot and a bunch of other children were put into camps indefinitely bc they werent white and like a journalist was murdered and like you are being lied to daily by rich liars who harass / assault women & wont renounce white supremacy

"Trump's trade war took a stunning bite out of the US economy, and it's the strongest evidence yet that he's shooting himself in the foot"Peter GowenMon, 05 Nov 2018 16:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/11/5/trumps-trade-war-took-a-stunning-bite-out-of-the-us-economy-and-its-the-strongest-evidence-yet-that-hes-shooting-himself-in-the-foot5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5be052ad1ae6cf53b466760eBob Bryan in Business Insider:

GDP rose at an annualized rate of 3.5% in the third quarter. But the contribution of net exports of goods and services — the measure of how much trade added or subtracted to GDP growth — was a dismal -1.78 percentage points.

- It was the largest negative contribution to GDP growth for trade in 33 years; in the second quarter of 1985, trade subtracted 1.91 points.

…

Uncertainty over trade policy may have also contributed to muted growth in capital expenditures by businesses. Nonresidential fixed investment — spending on large-ticket items like equipment — added only 0.12 points to GDP growth, the lowest in seven quarters, while overall fixed investment was a 0.04-point drag, the worst in 10 quarters.

]]>"In New York, California, Texas, and 27 other states you can take time off from work to vote — here's the full list"Peter GowenMon, 05 Nov 2018 15:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/11/5/in-new-york-california-texas-and-27-other-states-you-can-take-time-off-from-work-to-vote-heres-the-full-list5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5be05693cd836658b4d9973bRachel Gillett and Grace Panetta in Business Insider list every state’s laws around taking time off work to go vote. If you haven’t been able to early vote, this may be a good opportunity to ensure you have the chance to contribute to the democratic functioning of our country.

Currently, there is no federal law that mandates employers provide their employees time off to cast their ballots. But the majority of US states have time-off-to-vote laws, also referred to as voter-leave laws, and have different requirements and exceptions for employers and employees.

While some states guarantee paid time off, for example, others do not. And the time guaranteed for employees to vote varies state-by-state as well.

“Trumpism” is a politics of racial demagoguery. America in the age of Donald Trump is more permissive of explicit racism than it’s been at any point since the civil rights era. And because bigotries rarely dance alone, the president’s nativism is accompanied by anti-black racism—first seen in his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama—anti-Muslim prejudice, and anti-Semitism.

These ideologies exist on a continuum, with casual prejudice on one end and virulent hatred on the other. But common to every expression is a desire to ostracize, remove, and even eliminate the racialized group. The difference between segregation to isolate black Americans and race riots to remove them is one of degree, not kind. Individual efforts to keep black people out of public space are a soft expression of the same impulse that drives radical calls for a white “ethno-state.”

Seen as part of a continuum, the relationship between bigoted rhetoric and bigoted action becomes clearer. The former can facilitate the latter. A society permissive of rhetorical dehumanization is necessarily more vulnerable to actual dehumanization. Allow racial contempt to spread unchallenged, and racist violence will eventually follow.

…

Over the past month, in order to generate support for his political party, the president has tried to generate racial hysteria out of a small “caravan” of migrants headed for the American border, where they will attempt to claim amnesty…

Right-wing media followed suit, taking the president’s claim, amplifying it, and connecting it to a conspiracy theory accusing liberal philanthropist George Soros of orchestrating the “caravan.”…

This message of dangerous hordes and anti-American conspiracies was meant to inspire fear and hatred. And those inclined to fear and hate picked up the message. One of them, who blamed a Jewish refugee organization for bringing “invaders that kill our people,” decided to act, killing 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in the worst anti-Semitic terror attack in American history, part of a surge of anti-Semitic hate crimes since 2016…

]]>"A President Who Condones Political Violence"Peter GowenSat, 03 Nov 2018 20:30:00 +0000https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/trump-bombs-florida-tweets/574108/5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5bddcede032be4373f096134David Frum in The Atlantic:

It’s striking that the president has not offered a word of sympathy for any of the targets of the bombs. After all, even if the “false flag” theory were true to any degree, the people targeted were indeed targeted. The motives or identity of the would-be bomber do not mitigate the shock and threat to the person receiving the bomb—including the line-of-duty security personnel who encountered the bombs sent to Obama and others whose mail is screened for them.

…

When people talk about Trump condoning and inviting political violence, his behavior over the past 48 hours—and that of his followers—is exactly what they have in mind: the utter lack of sympathy for those attacked or threatened; the readiness to blame victims of terrorism for being terrorized; the determination to exonerate the president of any consequences for his own wild behavior; the indulgence of wild conspiracy theories as a means to achieve that exoneration, piped directly into the Oval Office from the furthest extremes of American life.

Only eight days ago, Trump praised a Republican member of Congress who physically attacked a reporter without provocation and then lied to the police about the attack. Today, Trump claims that there’s a conspiracy to blame him for bombs mailed to CNN and other people he has abused. And this claim is not Trump’s alone; it is echoed by many of the apologists and defenders of his government. Democracy has a rule, an absolute prohibition on the use or threat of violence to coerce political ends. Trump is walking the road away from democracy, and he is not walking alone.

"Judge Orders Evidence to Be Gathered in Emoluments Case Against Trump"Peter GowenSat, 03 Nov 2018 17:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/11/3/judge-orders-evidence-to-be-gathered-in-emoluments-case-against-trump5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5bddd062758d46146f335192Instead of divesting, or at least placing his businesses in a “blind trust,” Trump’s continued control of his businesses while he’s president remains an enormous conflict of interest (even Jimmy Carter was forced to sell his peanut farm, of all things). Since he became president, the use of his hotels by other countries’ diplomats has skyrocketed. It’s effectively bribery, and it may even be so great that it counts as an unconstitutional “emolument.” A few cases have been raised, and it looks like one’s satisfactory enough that it’s being pursued by the courts.

A federal judge in Maryland on Friday ordered evidence-gathering to begin in a lawsuit accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a financial interest in his company’s Washington hotel.

The plaintiffs are seeking records that could illuminate potential conflicts of interest between Mr. Trump and foreign leaders or state officials who patronize Trump International Hotel, blocks from the White House.

The judge, Peter J. Messitte of the United States District Court in Greenbelt, Md., said the Justice Department had failed to show a compelling reason to hold up the case while its lawyers appeal his earlier rulings. He ordered the parties to come up with a timeline within 20 days to produce evidence.

The lawsuit, filed by the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland, seeks for the first time to define the meaning of constitutional language that restricts the president from accepting financial benefits, so-called emoluments.

Bullshitting (in the technical sense of lying for lying’s sake) takes way more time and effort to refute than it does to employ. Serial liar (bullshitting) politicians, like Trump, enjoy a strategic communication advantage; until they’ve completely undermined their own trust, all they have to do to remain in power is continue to lie, forcing others to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy fact-checking, hours or days past when the last lie was told, always playing catch-up with the next.

Furthermore, partisans can pick and choose which lies they believe, and partisanship is so strong right now, that it takes a lot of lies, proven to be lies (and ones important to partisans), to break that trust. But it’s worth the effort, especially when the bullshitter is the president of the United States (and doubly when he’s a fascist, undermining our democracy), so here’s a good list for the rest of this campaign season, a la a tweet thread from Daniel Dale, when he attended one of Trump’s rallies a week ago:

Trump is doing a campaign rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin. Tweets in this thread.

And here’s A handy guide to Donald Trump’s most-frequent campaign rally lies and false claims. There are some real whoppers, but you’ll see a lot more mundane claims, like inflating job numbers. And they all matter, because they’re part of a continuous smokescreen, to distract us from what he’s really trying to do: soak the American taxpayer for himself, rig the economy even more in the favor of the wealthy, and create a white ethnostate.

]]>Trump's fascist fear-mongering leading into next weekPeter GowenFri, 02 Nov 2018 15:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/11/2/trumps-fascist-fear-mongering-leading-into-next-week5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5bdc6f4588251bda31ac43c1Trump’s still flogging conspiracy theories and the fear of the South American refugee caravan, regardless of the truth, actual risk, or basic human decency. And even though they still have to cross the entire country of Mexico (as the Military Times notes, “As of Monday, the caravan was still an estimated 1,000 miles away, traveling mostly on foot, a pace that would not bring those men, women and children to the U.S. border for weeks.”), he’s ordered troops to the border right now, in a complete waste of soldiers’ time and taxpayers money, just to look tough for partisan Republicans before Election Day, Tuesday.

So WH is closing with straight-up racist incitement not less than a week after a MAGA cultist tried to assassinate 13 officials and critics and 4 days after a Nazi cited WH-led immigration propaganda as his cause for committing slaughter.

His thread’s worth reading in full, as it contains the history of how a certain portion of the Republican Party willfully embraced a strategy of pushing coded racist appeals, that would slowly grow more untrue, violent, and explicit:

For those of you who don't remember, here are the 1988 ads and some supporting interviews, all taken from the outstanding documentary "Boogie Man" about GOP strategist Lee Atwater:

…

A native South Carolinian, Atwater knew the power of racist appeals and was willing to go to places where others wouldn't.

But he still understood it had to be done carefully. Here's his famous interview from 1981 on the use of racial "code words"

…

Unlike the Willie Horton ad -- which was outsourced to third parties to the point where Atwater insisted he had nothing to do with it -- this new ad is coming directly from the personal Twitter account of the president himself.

And it isn't just that the president of the United States is personally pushing white nationalist politics in its ugliest and crudest form, it's that he's doing it proudly and with purpose.

That is so, so much worse than "Willie Horton" ever was.

As a PS, here's another way the new ad is worse -- Dukakis was blamed for a furlough that did happen during his term, albeit through a policy his Republican predecessor created.

The new ad blames Democrats for things that happened on Republicans' watch.

I cannot stress enough how important this election is, first as a rejection of authoritarianism and xenophobia, but second as our chance to begin pushing back against concentrated power and corruption at the top, which has been ignored and allowed to fester for decades (no need to look any farther than the repeated financial-fraud-based recessions), leading to Trump. So vote, then stay engaged, continue to educate yourselves on what happens in our country, and keep voting for people whose eyes are open and will try to tackle the rot. Trump and his cronies won’t; they’re as much Of the Swamp as the rest of them.

]]>Electronic voting machines are wildly insecurePeter GowenThu, 01 Nov 2018 20:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/11/1/electronic-voting-machines-are-wildly-insecure5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5bdb5657c2241bcd3a0c4ca3The electronic voting machine industry is one big fraud. Machines are neither secure nor dependable. State election commissions don’t have the expertise (or budget) to understand the technical issues for a market to properly work. Clear, strong, enforceable, and enforced regulation is necessary, but until that happens, we’re stuck in the position where any claim of fraudulent manipulation (at least at the level of state election commissions) needs to be taken seriously. There was the recent bug in machines in Texas which was switching votes. And now security researchers are pointing out that machines since 2016 are less secure than previous ones! From simple research by Brian Varner in Wired (a la Bruce Schneier):

This year, I bought two more machines to see if security had improved. To my dismay, I discovered that the newer model machines—those that were used in the 2016 election—are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as “next generation,” and still in use today, are worse than they were before—dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation

]]>RE: Ending birthright citizenship for recent and/or "illegal" immigrantsPeter GowenWed, 31 Oct 2018 17:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/10/31/trump-lie-watch-ending-birthright-citizenship-for-recent-andor-illegal-immigrants5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5bd9a1808a922daf4af83f62The idea has frequently been pushed by the most racist politicians in America throughout our history, both to keep the USA more white/European/Western/whatever, and as a political tactic to get people’s votes by inducing panic and fear of outsiders (even though there’s never been a real risk of hostile internal takeover). And it’s been quietly brewing again for the past few years. So it’s no surprise that the White House (which, again, includes a few white supremacists and several other highly racist individuals) would bring it up a week before midterm elections which could determine whether the Republican Party holds onto either chamber of Congress. Trump gets a partial win just by keeping us distracted and fueling the culture war, though the racist operatives in the White House probably are pushing for an Executive Order to undermine the 14th Amendment, no matter that it would be flagrantly unconstitutional. Case law and original intent are definitive about the meaning of the 14th’s clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It really was meant to be as widely interpretable as it seems, intending to undo the Dred Scott decision and ensure citizenship to the children of slaves—slaves, people who were taken from their own countries and held no intent to settle (nor allegiance toward!) the United States. “Illegal” immigrants are clearly covered, and it would require passing another Amendment to undo that. As James Ho cites in The Federalist (which I highly recommend reading in full, as it addresses a lot of little “but what if…”s):

Senator Edgar Cowan (R-PA) – who would later vote against the entire constitutional amendment anyway – was the first to speak in opposition to extending birthright citizenship to the children of foreigners. Cowan declared that, “if [a state] were overrun by another and a different race, it would have the right to absolutely expel them.” He feared that the Howard amendment would effectively deprive states of the authority to expel persons of different races – in particular, the Gypsies in his home state of Pennsylvania and the Chinese in California – by granting their children citizenship and thereby enabling foreign populations to overrun the country. Cowan objected especially to granting birthright citizenship to the children of aliens who “owe [the U.S.] no allegiance [and] who pretend to owe none,” and to those who regularly commit “trespass” within the U.S.[22]

In response, proponents of the Howard amendment endorsed Cowan’s interpretation. Senator John Conness (R-CA) responded specifically to Cowan’s concerns about extending birthright citizenship to the children of Chinese immigrants:

“The proposition before us … relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. … I am in favor of doing so. … We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”

On the campaign trail, Trump first proposed a $10 trillion tax cut, far larger than any Republican rival's, but insisted it wouldn't boost the federal budget deficit because the economy would "take off like a rocket ship."

…the Treasury reported that the 2018 deficit swelled to $779 billion. That level, the highest in six years, marks a 17 percent increase over 2017.

The hack gap: how and why conservative nonsense dominates American politicsPeter GowenTue, 30 Oct 2018 17:30:00 +0000https://www.vox.com/2018/10/23/18004478/hack-gap-explained5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5bd66cf9104c7b918a4d258aVirtually all mainstream “conservative” arguments in the news these days are hypocritical smoke, but are given constant airtime, even by the centrist/liberal media which you might think shouldn’t bother (and/or would be better served ignoring the constant bad-faith whining).

Matthew Yglesias identifies a few major political/economic effects and causes among the moderate-to-far right political/media operatives that led not only to this, but was a significant cause of the increasing radicalism of the Republican Party, leading to Trump:

The hack gap has two core pillars. One is the constellation of conservative media outlets — led by Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch properties like the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but also including Sinclair Broadcasting in local television, much of AM talk radio, and new media offerings such as Breitbart and the Daily Caller — that simply abjure anything resembling journalism in favor of propaganda.

The other is that the self-consciousness journalists at legacy outlets have about accusations of liberal bias leads them to bend over backward to allow the leading conservative gripes of the day to dominate the news agenda. Television producers who would never dream of assigning segments where talking heads debate whether it’s bad that the richest country on earth also has millions of children growing up in dire poverty think nothing of chasing random conservative shiny objects, from “Fast & Furious” (remember that one?) to Benghazi to the migrant caravan.

And more than Citizens United or even gerrymandering, it’s a huge constant thumb on the scale in favor of the political right in America.

…

…there is simply no institution on the left that has anywhere near the institutional clout — to say nothing of the value system — of conservative broadcast media.

Specifically, by exploiting semi-random variation in Fox viewership driven by changes in the assignment of channel numbers, they find that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. Without Fox, in other words, the GOP’s only popular vote win since the 1980s would have been reversed and the 2008 election would have been an extinction-level landslide. And that’s only measuring the direct impact of the Fox cable network. If you consider the supplemental effect of Sinclair’s local news broadcast, the AM radio shows of Fox personalities like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and the broader constellation of right-wing punditry, the effect would surely be larger.

…

Democratic Party politicians’ statements about troops and other matters touching on patriotism are hyper-policed by easily triggered conservative snowflakes, whose mass panics easily come to dominate the national political agenda. And it is frustrating for liberals to watch this happen when Republican Party politicians are able to skate by with little scrutiny.

But here’s the critical thing: Even though plenty of liberals are happy to be mad about the double standard, nobody important in progressive political commentary is actually mad about Trump’s troop visiting schedule. We’re mad that Trump is destroying financial and environmental regulation while trying to screw poor people out of health care and nutrition assistance, all while imprisoning children seeking asylum and undermining the international order. That’s important stuff, while Trump’s golfing — like Clinton’s emails — fundamentally isn’t.

And yet elections are swung, almost by definition, not by the majority of people who correctly see the scope of the differences and pick a side but by the minority of people for whom the important divisions in US partisan politics aren’t decisive. Consequently, the issues that matter most electorally are the ones that matter least to partisans. Things like email protocol compliance that neither liberals nor conservatives care about even slightly can be a powerful electoral tool because the decisive voters are the ones who don’t care about the epic ideological clash of left and right.

But journalists take their cues about what’s important from partisan media outlets and partisan social media.

Thus, the frenzies of partisan attention around “deplorables” and “lock her up” served to focus on controversies that, while not objectively significant. are perhaps particularly resonant to people who don’t have firm ideological convictions.

Meanwhile, similar policy-neutral issues like Trump’s insecure cellphone, his preposterous claim to be too busy to visit the troops, or even his apparent track record of tax fraud don’t get progressives worked into a lather in the same way.

This is a natural tactical advantage that, moreover, serves a particular strategic advantage given the Republican Party’s devotion to plutocratic principles on taxation and health insurance that have only a very meager constituency among the mass public.

Trump is a fascistPeter GowenTue, 30 Oct 2018 15:30:00 +0000https://www.beetlebark.com/news/2018/10/29/trump-is-a-fascist5225f22ce4b03c5b68514ff0:5248a28ee4b0a201cbbfd01e:5bd66581e79c702f87a1b75d“Fascist” is overused, and there are a lot of definitions, because the self-identified fascist regimes from last century began so differently, and adopted different characteristics. I’ve never been that satisfied with any definition until reading Umberto Eco’s 1995 article in the New York Review of Books. He lists quite a few general traits of what he calls “Ur-Fascism”, and Trump’s speech—at his rallies, on Twitter, on tv—perfectly aligns with this list. Trump is a fascist. The U.S. isn’t automatically fascist because he’s president, of course, and Trump may not care whether he succeeds at creating a totalitarian ethnostate dependent on him. But we need to stand up to his xenophobia and racism, his dark simplifying of reality and conspiracy-mongering, his narcissistic authoritarianism, and the many ways he’s trying to change the system to benefit him and his cronies. This is our democracy, if we can keep it.

I highly recommend reading the piece, and reflecting on Eco’s list: Ur-Fascism.

i keep thinking about that comment that if you've ever wondered what you would have done as a German in Nazi Germany, well you're doing it right now.